Hello,
I need a moderate amount of non-volatile memory (for FPGA configuration purposes and the like), but can't tolerate configuration errors due to charge leaks, cosmic radiation or just the malfunction of the chip. I thought that something like RAID5 imposed on memory chips/SD cards would be fine. It would be extremely simple in an FPGA, but it creates a chicken and egg problem: how can you read the controller's configuration from flash if the flash itself might be corrupt.
It could also be done easily in hardware, but would require parallel-output chips, which are not particularly trendy nowadays and the SPI decoding circuitry would be insanely complex with simple gates.
I presume I am not the first person to have such a need, so what would you recommend me? It has to be autonomous only for (early) reads, the write mode part can materialize later within the FPGA. Any ideas?
Best regards, Piotr